This invention relates to van bodies and is particularly concerned with side-access van bodies.
The term "van body" is used herein and in the claims to mean any body which has a bed for supporting cargo to be transported and a roof disposed above such bed and which is, or is intended to be mounted, on wheels to provide the trailer portion of an articulated road vehicle, the body portion of a non-articulated road vehicle, or the body portion of a railway freight train. The access sides may be the vertical lateral or end sides of the body but will usually be the two parallel lateral sides of the van body.
A side-access van body is generally provided with a sliding door closure structure which may be a solid door structure or a curtain structure as for example is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,709,552.
The present invention is especially adapted for use on vehicles which are used for urban deliveries.
With an urban delivery side-access vehicle having a solid sliding door structure which usually consists of two doors each adapted to be slid to overlap the other to provide access to the van body it is a drawback that only half of the side can be opened at any one time so that if a load to be discharged extends over more than half the length of the van body then, if it is of a unitary nature, it needs to be maneuvered out through the open half of the van body side, or if it is made up of a number of units it usually requires, after part removal, both doors to be slid to the other end of the van body to allow discharge of the rest of the load. It is also a disadvantage that due to the size of the doors they tend to be relatively heavy and so require the use of considerable energy on the part of the van driver to open and close them.
With an urban delivery side-access vehicle of a curtain-sided nature such as disclosed in the aforesaid Patent if it is a drawback that to provide access one end of the curtain and the various buckles must be released before access can be achieved and, after unloading, the end must be secured and all the buckles re-fastened. This is time-consuming and is unsatisfactory when the vehicle is being used around a town or city for "stop-start" urban delivery purposes.